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Silke Trommer
Watering Down Austerity:
Scalar Politics and Disruptive Resistance in Ireland
New Political Economy (Accepted for publication January 2018)
Abstract:
Across Europe, resistance to austerity takes place in the household, the local community, and
the everyday. Disruptive practices of refusal and subversion leave elite domination
incomplete in the age of austerity. Under what conditions disruptive resistance affects national
and international policy-making is less clear. The article uses the analytical concept of scalar
politics to engage this question. Exploring anti-water charges/anti-austerity protests in the
Republic of Ireland, I highlight the importance of the scalar dimensions of materiality and
culture in making disruptive resistance partially successful in this case. Economic crisis
allowed Irish elites to transfer water reforms onto international and European political scales.
The physical conditions required for reform meant that sustained local disruptions rendered
implementation impossible. Irish history and culture provided semiotic signifiers to mobilise
against an overwhelming force of domination. Scalar politics constitutes a useful theoretical
frame for analysing the social embeddedness of the economy beyond the Irish case. If
political economists acknowledge the social construction of scalar arrangements, we can
investigate how political actors use dimensions of scale strategically to pursue their goals. We
can also pay analytical attention to how certain normative preferences come to dominate
certain policy domains through processes of scalar contestation.
Key words: Austerity, resistance, scale, culture, water
1
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank Patrick O'Donnell, Susanne Soederberg, Ian Bruff, Orla Lehane, and the
two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Earlier versions of this article were
presented at the Manchester Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence Seminar Series (University of
Manchester), the Studies in National and International Development Lecture Series (Queen's
University), the 2016 Everyday Revolutions in Southern and Easter Europe Conference
(University of Manchester), and the 2017 International Initiative for Promoting Political
Economy and Critical Political Economy Research Network Conference (Berlin School of
Economics and Law).
Introduction
The age of austerity is defined as the era, starting roughly in the 1990s, when unfavourable
demographic and economic conditions began jeopardizing existing models of public
spending, and public dissatisfaction with established democracies began to rise (Schäfer and
Streeck 2013). During the Eurozone Crisis that followed the Global Financial Crisis of
2007/08, austerity was met with public protests and the rise of anti-establishment parties in
Greece, Portugal, and Spain. These countries were habitually contrasted with European Union
(EU) members whose citizens were thought to be more accepting of austerity (Chabanet and
Royall 2015, Cohen et al. 2015). In the political legitimation of austerity, the Republic of
Ireland in particular came to serve as the example of a society that consents to the social costs
of fiscal adjustment.i Such discursive practices sustain a broadly-held notion that the political
economy of European austerity pitches a pro-austerity Central and Northern European core
against a rebellious and fiscally feckless Southern periphery.
2
Today, scholarship on resistance to austerity in the European North abounds (Bailey and
Shibata 2017, Cullen and Murphy 2017, Murphy 2016). The critical political economy
literature has shown that across Europe, resistance to austerity is exercised in the local, the
household, and the everyday (Baily et al. 2017). Enacted through disruptive practices of
refusal, subversion, and/or escape, these forms of protest ultimately leave the domination that
economic and political elites exercise in the age of austerity incomplete (Huke et al. 2015).
Why disruptive resistance succeeds has been studied to a lesser degree. Open questions
include: What repertoires in the tool box of disruptive protest do local communities apply?
Can disruptive protest impact on national and international decision-makers? And under what
conditions is this possible?
This article uses a case study of anti-water charges/anti-austerity protests in Ireland to explore
these questions. In the next section, I set out my methodology for studying Ireland as a case of
partially successful disruptive resistance to austerity. The following section traces the political
process through which water reform became a key bone of contention in Ireland’s austerity
agenda. I show how in the scalar politics of Irish water provisioning, elites tied water reform
to Ireland’s austerity programme with the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
(herein: 'Troika'). Citizens successfully resisted these reforms through disruptive practices
from below, and the reforms were eventually abandoned. On both counts, the material
dimensions of the scalar politics of Irish water reform were essential to the successes of the
various political actors. In addition, protesters and elites used cultural references, among other
semiotic signifiers, to mobilise in favour or against water charges/austerity in Ireland.
Protesters' rhetorical and symbolic practices associated with Irish history and folklore worked
to legitimate illegal tactics and to create solidarity in adverse political conditions. These scalar
dimensions were inappropriate for confronting austerity in other policy areas. Hence, water
protests helped watering down the Irish austerity agenda, but did not reverse it. I conclude that
3
paying analytical attention to scalar politics, including their material and cultural dimensions,
provides promising avenues for future research on the political economy of the age of
austerity.
Methodology
Disruptive resistance, scalar politics, and culture as semiotic practice are central analytical
concepts of my case study. David Bailey points out that disruptive resistance “seek[s] to
impose a particular agenda on decision makers through non-cooperation and obstructive
dissent” (Bailey 2015: 9). Repertoires of disruptive protest include demonstrations, marches,
boycotts,ii civil disobedience, destruction of property, occupations, rioting, and other forms of
innovative, elite-challenging protest. Although much of the literature finds “successful
failure” of disruptive austerity protest at best (Bailey et al. 2017), the article engages the
insight that localised and micro-scale resistance can in principle impact on national and
international political processes, because local, sub-national, national, and international
political scales are interconnected.
To explore these mechanisms, I use the political geography concepts of scale and scalar
politics. Like the analytical concept of policy level, scale captures the fact that political
processes take place across different political settings. These are institutionally anchored at
varying levels of distance from citizens – for example from the town hall to the national
government, to international institutions. Unlike the concept of level, scale places special
emphasis on the relational aspect of these various political spheres and sees them in a
dialectical, rather than hierarchical relationship (Howitt 1998). Individual scales are
constituted by “a number of relations between geopolitics, territory, structure, culture, history,
economy, environment, society, and so on” (Howitt 1998, 52). These elements may relate
certain scales more closely to one another than others. Political actors and institutions may
further act on multiple scales simultaneously, thus creating a web of social, political, and
4
material relations that co-constitute scales as political spheres. Because individual scales and
their cross-linkages are socially constructed, their concrete shape constitutes “a material
expression of evolving power relations” across society (MacKinnon 2010, 22).
Danny MacKinnon introduces the concept of “scalar politics” to study how specific political
processes and institutionalised practices transfer across, and in the process alter, political
scales over time. In addition to discursive, ideational, institutional, and legal practices,
material conditions constitute scale, and political actors may seek to manipulate any of these
dimensions to pursue their goals (MacKinnon 2010). Powerful political actors often attempt to
monopolise global and national political scales, from which they exercise control over local,
urban or household political scales. However, their goal typically is gaining control over
specific activities or policy fields, and not over a specific scale per se. In addition, the process
is not always successful or complete. Some political actors manage to transfer their political
struggles across scales, or undermine established practices that locate specific political issue
within a given scale (MacKinnon 2010).
Much of the existing literature on resistance to Irish austerity is centred in political geography
research, explores local initiatives and/or asks if and how scale jumping occurs (Attuyer 2015,
O’Callaghan et al. 2014). My analytical focus on the question 'why may disruptive resistance
to austerity succeed?' precludes me from systematically exploring the full theoretical potential
of scalar politics for the study of the political economy of the age of austerity in this article.
The article also does not engage the literature on water struggles across the globe (Sultana and
Loftus 2012), although Irish water protesters had some contacts to water campaigners from
elsewhere (O’Riordan 2014). Despite these limitations, my case study reveals that
incorporating scalar politics into political economy has a number of analytical and theoretical
benefits.
5
The concept of scalar politics helps political economists investigating how and why certain
political agendas and normative preferences come to dominate certain policy domains, and
under what conditions alternative ideas may penetrate the mainstream in the age of austerity
(Konzelmann 2014). First, scalar politics lets us question to what extent the institutional and
political environment of contentious politics is given. Economic, environmental, ideational,
and social forces all play a part in how political struggles evolve over time. Scalar politics
reminds us that the institutional and political orders in which these struggles take place are
themselves the product of social contestation. The social and political consensus that upholds
existing political scales, including the view that certain issues are naturally tied to certain
scales, need not remain stable over time. Second, material conditions not only include forms
of economic wealth and benefit that political economists habitually study. Seen through the
lens of scalar politics, materiality also encompasses environmental and physical factors, that
is to say any element of the political process that is part of the natural world. Third, adopting
scalar politics as an analytical frame allows investigating how different actors engage scales
strategically to serve their political purposes.
These processes can be made visible and critically examined. While any of the above-
mentioned constitutive elements of scale can be at play in scale jumping, my case study
places specific emphasis on the role played by culture, understood as semiotic practice, in
addition to the material dimensions of the scalar politics I investigate. Culture as semiotic
practice is a conceptual term that evolved out of scholarly debates over the notion of political
culture (Ingelhart 1988). The intellectual origins of the political culture concept lay in Max
Weber's 1904/05 two-part essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The view
that orientations towards the political system are culturally specific has since been widely
critiqued as tautological, empirically untenable, and culturally essentialist.
6
In political science, Lisa Wedeen (2002) suggests conceptualising culture as practices of
meaning-making. Culture as semiotic practice sees culture not as a fixed and stable system of
signifiers that is inherent to a clearly defined social group. Instead, the approach encourages
scholars to ask in what way observable rhetorical and symbolic practices create, sustain,
challenge, or undermine the power relations at play in a particular political process. Because
meaning is rarely unequivocal in the social world, semiotic practices around cultural
understandings and norms are themselves contested (Wedeen 2002). The struggle over culture
as semiotic practice is therefore part and parcel of the broader struggle over political
domination, and encompasses all aspects of political order.
Culture as semiotic practice encourages political economists to investigate empirically how
political actors make sense of the political context in which they contest how the world is
organised and who benefits. This requires asking which specific rhetorical and symbolic
practices political actors use, what meaning they give to these signifiers, and how such
practices affect the political contestations under investigation. Such empirical findings allow
teasing out how semiotic signifiers serve to establish or challenge the structures of domination
that uphold social, political, and economic order. Adopting the approach in political economy
thus allows deepening our theoretical understanding of the concrete mechanisms through
which the economy is socially embedded (Polanyi 1944).
These questions typically lead scholars to consider the historical context through which
rhetorical and symbolic practices evolved and to which they often refer. In social movement
studies, Laurence Cox (2017) also theorises Irish anti-water charges protests in their historical
context. Cox identifies the Irish water charges movement as the driving force of Irish anti-
austerity struggles. He locates its origins in Irish working class, community-based
mobilisation over five decades, from the Dublin Housing Action Committee and initiatives to
deal with drug use in working class areas, to resistance to bin charges (Cox 2017). To account
7
for these levels of self-organisation, Cox urges scholars to develop a “notion of social
movement shaped by historical context and social situation” (Cox 2017, 171).
The article similarly embraces a context-dependent approach to understanding contemporary
political action. Rather than highlighting historical continuity, I treat historical phenomena as
providing semiotic signifiers that political actors summon in their attempts to establish and
challenge political and economic domination in the present. In the case of Irish water protests,
culture, and history, provided the symbols and language of successful disruptive resistance.
While Cox focuses exclusively on Ireland’s urban working class, I show that water protests
took place across all 26 Irish counties, encompassing rural as well as urban communities.
Official data on local protests in Ireland does not exist. I therefore gathered data through
media sources, interviews, and participant observation. I scanned traditional media reports on
Irish water protests and conducted seven semi-structured interviews in Dublin in 2015 with
members of Right2Water. Right2Water is a network campaigning against water charges. It
comprises five trade unions,iii four political parties,iv independent members of the Irish
Parliament, Dáil Éireann (herein: Dáil), and community groups (Right2Water 2017).v Based
on this data, I compile a chronology of events and indicative figures to trace how materiality
shaped the scalar politics of Irish water reform in the next section. Since the necessary
resources to conduct extensive ethnographic field work on local water protests were not
available, I relied on social media as data source. Because protesters organised online, I could
retrieve data via google, youtube, facebook, and twitter. I further participated in anti-water
charges/anti-austerity demonstrations in Dublin in 2015vi and took field notes and
photographs. All of these sources serve as evidence of semiotic practices in and around the
Irish water/austerity struggle that I analyse in section four.
The Scalar Politics of Watering Down Austerity
8
Water provisioning has been a contentious topic in Irish politics several times since the 1970s.
In political struggles over water reform, Irish political elites and the Irish public have
repeatedly relied on the material dimensions of scalar politics to attain their goals. As I detail
below, the Irish government used economic crisis, and notably the 2010 Troika bail-out, to
enforce domestic water reform through international and European scales. The physical
aspects of implementing the reforms empowered Irish residents to disrupt this agenda at the
local scale. Over time, local disruptive resistance proved to be one effective tool for re-
establishing the national scale as the appropriate domain for deciding on water provisioning in
Ireland. Abandoning water reform and refunding water charges pitches the Irish government
against the EU at the time of writing.
In 1978, the Irish government abolished household-level water charges (Carroll 2014). Local
authorities provided for domestic supplies through fiscal means. Based on ideas of market
efficiency and individual incentive structures for conservation, international policy circles in
the 1980s began favouring a market-environmentalist model over taxation-based municipal
water provisioning (Bakker 2010). Over four decades, consecutive Irish governments
gradually entered into international and European agreements to implement market-
environmentalist models nationally, despite local boycotts to oppose these reforms.
During the 1980s Irish recession, legislation was passed to permit service charges, which
certain local communities subsequently introduced. From 1994 to 2000, a period of export-led
growth averaging 9.1% produced the Irish economic miracle of the Celtic Tiger (Ó Riain
2014). In the same era, the 1992 International Conference on Water and Environment
convened in Dublin and enshrined market-environmentalist thinking on water provisioning in
the Dublin Statement on Water and Sustainable Development (Dukelow 2016). When Dublin
City Council introduced water charges in 1994, this was met with demonstrations and
boycotts that led to the abolition of charges before the 1997 general election (Gross 2014).
9
In 2000, the European Water Framework Directive (herein: ‘Framework Directive’) translated
the market-environmentalist principles of the Dublin Statement into European Law. It
requires that member states achieve cost recovery of water services and a disaggregation of
industry, households, and agriculture in the structuring of charges by 2010. Its Article 9.4 is
known as the Irish exemption. It dispenses governments from levying adequate user charges
in cases where there is established practice to the contrary. Despite the Irish exemption in the
Framework Directive, Irish governments repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, recommended
reintroducing water charges between 2003 and 2009 (Dukelow 2016).
Yet, economic catastrophe substantially altered Ireland’s structural conditions from 2008
onwards. In this context, the Irish political elite created scalar linkages between national,
European, and international politics to accomplish their long-held goal of implementing
market-environmentalist reforms in the domestic water regime. In September 2008, following
the burst of a home-made property bubble, Ireland slid into recession (Robbins and Lapsley
2014). The unfolding Global Financial Crisis brought the Irish banking system to the brink of
collapse. Over the next five years, the government unilaterally delivered seven austerity
budgets (Gleeson 2013), while the economic crisis deepened (FitzGerald and Kearney 2011).
In November 2010, Ireland was effectively locked out of international bond markets and had
to negotiate its €85 billion bailout package with the Troika. In a letter to the IMF in December
2010, the Irish government unilaterally offered to “move towards full cost-recovery in the
provision of water services” (IMF 2010), which the Troika accepted. The government used
the Troika bail-out to turn household-level water charges from a contentious political project
of the Irish political elite into an international debt conditionality (Dukelow 2016). The
initiative also created a European legal obligation to practice market-environmentalism
domestically, due to the government’s decision to derogate from the Irish exemption in the
Framework Directive.
10
In November 2010, the government announced that “water charges will be introduced in 2012
or 2013” (Irish Times 2016). Under the Water Services Act 2013, Irish Water was created in
July 2013 as a semi-state utility company and charged with the commercialisation of water
provisioning. From 2014, water charges became the pivotal issue in Irish austerity politics
through which many other grievances were aired (Hearne 2015). Daniel Finn (2015) identifies
four elements as essential to the rise of Irish water protests. They are the regressive nature of
2012-2014 austerity budgets, the horizontal nature of water charges, previous experience with
water and non-payment campaigns, and anger about corruption among the Irish political and
economic elite.
Unlike welfare cuts and increased taxation, water reforms required citizens' active
participation, from the registration of households with Irish Water, to the installation of water
meters, and revenue collection. Because of these material necessities, disruption constituted
an effective tool for resisting water reforms locally. Irish residents took to disruptive
resistance in their droves. The first deadline for households to register with Irish Water was
set on 31 October 2014 (Carroll 2014). According to media reports, “the deadline was ignored
by hundreds of thousands of people” (Pope 2015).
Because water charges could not be applied without registration, the government created
incentives to register. It introduced a Water Conservation Grant of €100 for each registering
household in November 2014. Irish Water moved the registration deadline three times over
eight months: to 30 November 2014, 2 February 2015, and 30 June 2015 (Irish Water 2017).
Levels of charges were almost halved, from an initial €278 per annum for a two-person
household and €584 for a five-person household, to €160 for a single-person household and
€260 for households of two or more adults (Citizens Information 2016). Rates were capped
until 1 January 2019, with a view to prolonging the capped amounts.
11
Despite these concessions, the Comptroller & Auditor General reported in August 2015 that
422,455 of Ireland’s 1.9 million households, or 27.5%, had not registered with Irish Water
(thejournal.ie 2015). When quarterly bills were issued from April 2015, non-payment was
wide-spread. According to Irish Water, the first bill issued was paid by 44% of households,
the second bill by 55% of households, and the third bill by 61% of households. Thus, even
official figures indicate a non-payment rate of more than one in three households over the
year 2015.
Implementing water reform further required metering households, because charges would
remain below the capped fee if metered consumption was low. Physical interferences with
installations were widespread, leading to slow progress. Irish Water hired three private
contractors, GMC/Sierra Ltd, J Murphy & Sons Ltd, and Coffey Northumbrian Ltd, to install
water meters across Ireland (Kelly 2013). Protesters tried to prevent metering companies from
accessing their housing estate or street, or blocked access to their property. Reporting for the
newspaper Irish Times, Patrick Freyne describes protesters as “a network of people ready to
drop everything and go to block a road when a text-message call-out lets them know that
water-meter installers are entering an estate” (Freyne 2014). Michael O'Brien of People
before Profit provided a similar account in one of the interviews conducted. He said:
The most oppressed, low-income layer in Irish society seemed to
embrace social media as an organising tool to alert people that
[installation workers] were trying to install a meter in this street or that
street and people would respond. You would see that in the matter of
an hour, 50 to 100 people could just be amassed and preventing the
meters from being installed.vii
Daihí Doolan of Sinn Féin explained in another of the interviews conducted how the physical
aspects of water reforms enabled this type of disruptive resistance:
12
All the other taxes [the Irish government] introduced, they cut, so you
couldn't resist it, or they put their hands in your pay pocket. But here
they have to come up and drill a hole outside your door and put in a
meter and ask you to pay for it. So [people say] ... “you're gonna come
and drill a hole outside my door? The hell you will.”viii
In autumn 2014, groups of so-called ‘water meter fairies’ began appearing across Ireland.
They consisted of individuals possessing the technical skill to remove installed meters at
residents’ requests. Both tampering with water meters and encouraging others to interfere on i After seven austerity budgets, Ireland presented a 7% growth rate in 2015. For a critical assessment of
Ireland's economic recovery see Robbins and Lapsley 2014.
ii It is worth recalling here that the word “boycott” etymologically originated during the Irish Land War 1879-
1882 (Oxford Dictionaries 2015). Local populations in County Mayo socially isolated the English land agent
Captain Charles C. Boycott to avoid rent increases.
iii Mandate Trade Union, Unite the Union, Civil Public and Services Union, Operative Plasterers and Allied
Trades Society of Ireland, and Communications Workers Union.
iv Anti Austerity Alliance, People before Profit, Sinn Féin, and Communist Party of Ireland.
v David Connolly (SIPTU, 14.12.2015), Daithí Doolan (Sinn Féin, 3.12.2015), David Gibney (Mandate Trade
Union Ireland, 4.12.2015), Eugene McCartan (Communist Party of Ireland, 30.11.2015), Paul Murphy (Anti
Austerity Alliance, 8.12.2015), Michael O’Brien (People before Profit, 7.12.2015), Brendan Ogle (Unite,
10.12.2015), and Michael Taft (Unite, 14.12.2015). Women associated with Right2Water did not respond to
my repeated requests for interviews. Several interviewees however testified in our conversations that local
level activism on water charges was often coordinated and run by women. These observations suggest that
the gendered nature of disruptive protests presents one fruitful avenue for future research.
vi Right2Water Protest 20.6.2015, Save Moore Street Protest 28.11.2015, National Demonstration on
Homelessness and Housing 1.12.2015, Anti-water Charges Protest 8.12.2015.
vii Author’s interview with Michael O’Brien, 7 December 2015, Dublin.
viii Author’s interview with Daithí Doolan, 3 December 2015, Dublin.13
one's behalf is a criminal offence under the Water Services Act 2007. Fairies were thus
“usually kitted out in a Guy Fawkes mask to hide their identity” (thejournal.ie 2014). They
relied on the internet and local community events to connect with residents. In the interview,
Daithí Doolan described a one-time encounter with water meter fairies at a local community
meeting in North Dublin where “these two lads showed up I had never seen, they were 17”.
He recalled the young men saying: “we're water meter fairies, anybody who wants their water
meter removed, you give us a shout and they'll be gone.” Doolan added:
[Water meter fairies] come in at night and remove the meter. They
don't impose it on people. [They say]: “If you want the meter, 100%.
But if you don't want it, we come and take it out.” I never met them
before, never met them again, they just appeared there, like fairies.
Two lads, come in in the night, gone.ix
According to a County Cavan newspaper, local water meter fairies were operating at a rate of
ten meter removals per week (Enright 2015).
Leaving the two socialist parties Anti-Austerity Alliance and People before Profit aside,
Right2Water organisations and Irish trade unions did not actively call for or organise such
disruptions. As David Gibney of Mandate stressed : “we supported all tactics, but we didn't
prescribe tactics. Some people are blocking water meter installations, some people are
boycotting, some people are not registering. They're doing whatever they want.”x Instead, the
protests were organised locally. Michael O'Brien testified that “a grass roots spontaneous
movement erupted ... particularly in working class areas to passively resist the installation.”
He noted: “it’s a big unifier, everybody gets their bill, and people have improvised their own
means of organising around it. It didn’t happen in a uniform way.”xi
ix Author’s interview with Daithí Doolan, 3 December 2015, Dublin.14
Local community groups organised so-called “burn the bills” or “bin the bills” events at
which citizens collectively destroyed their Irish Water bills. These groups, their events, and
water meter fairies activities can be documented online and provide a proxy for assessing how
widespread Irish Water boycotts were at the county level, in the absence of better data. Table
1 gives an approximation of local anti-water charges groups, burn the bills and bin the bills
events reported, and water meter fairies spotted for the period 2014-2016, arranged by county.
Table 1. Localised anti-water charges agitation in Ireland, 2014-16 (by county)
County Number of local
groups against
water charges
Burn the bills*/Bin
the bills+ events
reported
Water meter
fairies spotted*
Carlow 3 * *
Cavan 3 * *
Clare 5 + *
Cork 20 * *
Donegal 7 *+ *
Dublin 87 *+ *
Galway 11 *+ *
Kerry 7 * *
Kildare 6 *+ *
x Author’s interview with David Gibney, 4 December 2015, Dublin.
xi Author’s interview with Michael O’Brien, 7 December 2015, Dublin.15
Kilkenny 4 * *
Laois 2 * *
Leitrim 1 * *
Limerick 10 *+ *
Longford 2 * *
Louth 6 *
Mayo 2 + *
Meath 9 + *
Monaghan 6
Offaly 3 *
Roscommo
n
1 * *
Sligo 2 * *
Tipperary 10 *+
Waterford 9 + *
Westmeath 7 + *
Wexford 9 *+ *
16
Wicklow 3 *+ *
Source: author's internet search on google, you tube, and facebook.
Table 1 shows that disruptive resistance was practised in all 26 Irish counties. 235 local anti-
water charges groups could be identified online. 67 were organised at the county level while
168 groups organised at the level of towns. Burn the bills protests were held across at least 19
Irish counties. Local communities in at least 13 counties also held bin the bills events. Water
meter fairies operated in at least 24 counties.
From mid-2015, material obstacles to Ireland's water reforms became apparent to political
actors at the European scale. Their decisions added to the political pressure the Irish
government was facing domestically to retract the reforms. In July 2015, the European
Commission's Directorate-General Eurostat ruled that Irish Water was “a non-market entity
controlled by government” (Eurostat 2015: 12). As a result, Irish Water had to be considered
to be within the public sector, jeopardising the Irish government's public financing and fiscal
consolidation plans. In its reasoning, Eurostat pointed to the fact that Irish Water did not
operate at the level of market prices, citing, inter alia, factors resulting directly from
disruptive resistance. These included the introduction of capped household rates, the Water
Conservation Grant, and uncertainties about the “impact on the realisation of revenues”
resulting from “the level of public disquiet around the introduction of water charges” in
Ireland (Eurostat 2015: 2-4).
Given the Eurostat ruling and broad public opposition evinced in large-scale Right2Water
protests and sustained local disruptions, the then-opposition party Fianna Fáil and most small
parties campaigned on a promise to end water charges in the 2016 general election. In June
2016, the new Dáil suspended water charges from 1 July 2016 and installed a parliamentary
17
commission to debate the future of water provisioning in Ireland (O’Halloran 2016). The Irish
Parliamentary Committee on Future Funding of Domestic Water Services made a series of
recommendations in April 2017, including continuing tax-based funding of water
provisioning, refunding paid water charges, and abandoning the metering programme, with
the exception of new apartment complexes. In September 2017, the government announced
that refunds of all water charges will commence in the autumn (Department of Housing,
Planning and Local Government 2017). The European Commission has advised that Ireland
could not revert back to the Irish exemption in the Framework Directive, since it had begun
moving to full cost recovery (Bardon 2016).
This section suggests that the material aspects of the scalar politics of Irish water reform
made disruptive resistance effective in this case. Yet, the existence of favourable material
conditions alone does not mean that people will engage in scalar politics. The next section
explores the role of culture as semiotic practice in mobilising political agency around Irish
water reforms.
Culture and Disruptive Resistance
Among a range of other semiotic signifiers, Irish elites and protesters regularly evoked Irish
history and culture during contestations over water reform/austerity. These actions were not
an accessory to scalar politics, because culture is one constitutive dimension of political scale.
As I show below, all political actors involved with the Irish water struggle engaged in
practices of meaning-making that fulfilled political functions. For Irish elites, the key goal
was to discourage and delegitimate resistance. Protesters used culture as semiotic practice to
mobilise against overwhelming forms of domination, legitimate illegal tactics, and create a
sense of solidarity among a broad range of people. Semiotic practices relating to Irish history
and culture could not easily resonate at European or international scales, because their
18
meaning is not as easily understood outside of Ireland. Semiotic practices thus worked to
support the protesters' overall goal of anchoring water politics within the national scale.
In the context of Irish austerity politics, Irish elites and protesters provided alternative
readings of Irish history, that served to discourage or encourage water/austerity protests. Irish
political and economic elites discursively used Irish colonial history as evidence for an
allegedly 'Irish' propensity to submit to domination, which works to cement the (false) notion
that Ireland has known no significant protests in the age of austerity (Murphy 2016). The
rhetorical and symbolic references that water/austerity protesters made to Irish rebellions
created a counter-narrative to the elite rhetoric. I took images 1, 2 and 3 at the June 2015 anti-
water charges protest I attended in Dublin. All three images evoke Irish rebellions against
colonial domination or capitalist exploitation.
Image 1 shows protesters rallying outside Dublin's General Post Office (GPO), which was a
regular occurrence during Irish water/austerity protests. The GPO is not a government
building, nor does it have obvious links with water charges or austerity. However, the
building headquartered the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising against British colonial rule. The
Irish Republic was proclaimed in the GPO on Easter Monday 1916. Although British forces
19
defeated the rising within days and executed its leaders, the political momentum set off by the
events eventually led to the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. At the centre of the image
is a protester wearing a T-Shirt worn by many participants at the demonstration. The T-Shirt
reads “1916 We Died for Your Right to Water Don't Throw it Away!” and displays the 16
leaders of the Easter Rising. The slogan appears misleading at first, because water was not as
such at issue in the rising. However, the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic declares that
the ownership of the island of Ireland resides with the Irish people. The semiotic signifiers on
the T-Shirt, as well as the regular practice of marching on a post office, link water charges in
the austerity era to issues of Irish self-determination and sovereignty.
Image 2 shows protesters carrying a banner that displays two groups of women. The top
image reads “Women of Ireland 1915” and shows Cumann na mBan members marching in
Dublin. Cumann na mBan, translated as The Women's League, was an auxiliary formation of
the Irish Volunteers that provided active women fighters to rebel strongholds during the
Easter Rising. The bottom image reads “The Pink Ladies against Injustice 2015” and shows a
social justice vigil held by Irish women dressed in pink.xii The simultaneous display of
20
women protesters then and now draws parallels between both groups. Because Irish elites of
the time opposed the Easter Rising, the banner implies parallels between confrontations
among Irish elites and the Irish people during colonial times with conforontations among Irish
elites and the Irish people in the age of austerity. Like the T-Shirt in image 1, and the practice
of marching on the GPO, the banner frames issues related to austerity as inherently national
issues.
Image 3 shows a protester carrying a banner that reads “Let Us Arise” and displays a drawing
of the James Larkin statue on Dublin's O'Connell Street. James Larkin was a Liverpool-born
revolutionary socialist who dominated the Irish labour movement at the time of the 1913
Dublin Lockout. The Lockout was a 5-month long, fierce and partially-violent labour dispute
pitching 20,000 employees with 80,000 dependents against the Dublin United Tramway
Company. The slogan on the banner is set in the present tense and the drawing, like the statue,
shows Larkin, with arms raised, speaking at a rally. Yet, contemporary water protesters know
that the Dublin Lockout was unsuccessful on its own terms, like most historical rebellions
against British colonial rule in Ireland. The repeated display of symbols associated with failed xii The Pink Gang are an Indian women's brigade that began drawing public attention in the early 2000s by
organising to fight the in justices of the Indian caste system and patriarchy.21
rebellions that is apparent in images 1, 2 and 3 normalises failure as an aspect of resistance. If
failure is expected, anticipating success seizes to be a prerequisite for joining resistance.
These semiotic practices create a sense of resistance as a valuable activity, irrespective of its
chances for success.
Rather than presenting Irish history as a history of acceptance of authority, protesters
presented it as a history of continuous rebellion. The semiotic practices created a sense of
solidarity among protesters and othering of the Irish political elite, because the signifiers
constitute relatively simple symbols of highly charged political content. Deliberately or
inadvertently, protesters linked the struggle against austerity to the struggle for Irish self-
determination and likened their actions to past activisms. This practice blurred what was at
stake in the protests, and thus widened the potential range of protesters, irrespective of
whether Irish residents resisted water charges as a matter of principled opposition to austerity,
to capitalism, to market-environmentalism, because residents felt they could not pay another
bill, or for other reasons. In addition, historical rebellions in Ireland were led against
overwhelming forces, such as the British Empire at the height of its global power, or capitalist
exploitation, and all failed. Recalling these events mobilises resistance against an
overwhelming force, because expecting defeat is not a valid reason for not joining resistance.
The semiotic practices of Irish water protests also engaged the high levels of civil
disobedience that have been prominent features of Irish political life from the colonial period
to the present day (FitzGerald 2011). The struggle for Irish independence produced two
distinct political traditions. A “vision of the Republic as a moral community, as a community
of equals submerging individual identity and self-interest for the common good” was
juxtaposed with a “lawyers' pragmatic nationalism ... which saw Irish independence as a
means to the construction of a commercialised, mechanically representative democracy” (Irish
Times 1991 cited in Kissane 1995: 46). The latter vision of civil society prevailed following
22
the creation of the Irish Free State. A Republican sub-culture however persisted, which is
ambiguous towards the state, the political process, and the rule of law in Ireland (Garvin
1991). This sub-culture is visible across much of the evidence presented in this article, but
most obviously at play in the workings of water meter fairies.
Fairies are integral to local folklore and ancient beliefs in Ireland. Unlike their 20th/21st
century popular culture counterparts, Irish fairies are neither charming and helpful, nor
beautiful to behold, nor of a human form, or specific gender. Prominent species appear as
spectral horsemen (e.g. Dullahans), small, aged men (e.g. Leprechauns and Grogochs), and
can shape-shift into horrifying forms (e.g. Pookas) or animals associated with witchcraft (e.g.
Banshees). Traditionally, Irish fairies are feared for inflicting mischief or harm on humans,
including their animals and property, in particular if humans disturb fairy habitats or ordinary
ways. The Catholic Church, political institutions and a nascent middle class striving to be
seen as modern began targeting fairy belief as superstitious and socially regressive following
the Irish famine. Large sections in particular of the rural population, however, maintained
belief in fairies well into the 20th century (Correll 2005). As one Irish water protester testified
on facebook: “my grandmother believed that the coming of electricity and television
frightened [fairies] off.” Referring to water meter fairies, the protester added: “Well
Grandmother, the fairies are back and they are doing good deeds.”
As evinced above, water meter fairies operated across all 26 Irish counties, yet their identity
often remained unknown even to those who had their water meters removed by fairies.
Knowlingly or unknowingly, water meter fairy groups bore resemblance with secret societies
such as the Houghers active in Connaught in 1711 (Beckett 1973), or the Whiteboys and
Ribbonmen active from 1761 into the nineteenth century that organised to disturb the
introduction of English law and property relations in Ireland (Knott 1984). These groups used
threats, assaults, destruction of property, boycotts and demonstrations as methods for
23
defending their “conscious notions of what were legitimate and illegitimate courses of action
to follow” (Knott 1984: 105). Their members often “kept their identity secret from the
authorities and (as far as it was possible) from the peasant community itself” (Knott 1984:
97). By and large, they defended “courses of action consistent with traditional values” in Irish
society and “were protected, if not actively encouraged, by the peasant community” (Knott
1984: 97).
Through fairy metaphors, protesters similarly framed what Irish law posited was criminal as
an illegal-but-not-illegitimate activity. A water meter fairy interviewed for Raidió Teilifís
Éireann (RTÉ)'s political programme Prime Time for example admitted openly that their
activity was illegal. The man, who remained anonymous, justified his actions as a water meter
fairy in terms of guaranteeing ordinary Irish people access to water and protecting them
against a crooked and fraudulent Irish governing elite (RTÉ 2014).
According to a Workers Solidarity Movement leaflet, water meter fairies acted in opposition
to an Irish state, represented by the Irish Police Force An Garda Síochána (herein: Gardaí) and
then-Prime Minister Enda Kenny, that has aligned itself with the Irish business elite,
epitomised by media tycoon and owner of GMC/Sierra Ltd.'s mother company Siteserv, Denis
O'Brien (below referred to as DOB). Pitching a traditional icon of Irish folklore, presumably
acting in the interests of Irish people, against a perceived corrupt and self-serving Irish
government acting alongside modern, faceless, profit-seeking corporations, the leaflet reads:
The Gardaí have started to chase the water meter fairies but have failed to
catch the slippery folk. According to ancient legend these fearsome foes of
the monster known only as the Dark Oul’ Boy (or DOB for short) emerge at
night to scoop up the nastiness dropped in housing estates all over the
country by his hirelings. The DOB is said to be in a terrible rage and the
screams of his Goblin Kenny have been heard echoing way beyond the gates
24
of the Dáil. It's said that at midnight last night the hounds of Garda were
dispatched ... but the fairies were faster and long gone before they arrived
(Workers Solidarity Movement 2015).
Upholding what they saw as the just rights of the community against a perceived corrupt Irish
state, protesters fed into above-mentioned perceptions of a legalistic, mechanically-
democratic Irish state apparatus as the illegitimate heir to the Irish Republican ideal embodied
in the 1916 Easter Rising.
When commenting on water meter fairies, Irish media and policy circles understood that the
fairy metaphor referred to the fear-inducing creature of Irish folklore that disrespects human
property, well-being, or law and order. There is no evidence to suggest that Irish elites
reverted back to dominant understandings in the English language of fairy as “a small
imaginary being of human form that has magical powers, especially a female one”, or
“offensive, informal a homosexual man” (Oxford Dictionary 2017, italics in original) to
discredit protesters. They also did not counter fairy belief with notions of social
backwardness, as Irish elites had done since the nineteenth century. Instead, they framed
fairies as constituting a serious, illegal-and-illegitimate threat to public order and the state.
Newspaper sources described water meter fairies as “rogue” (Healy 2015) or “clandestine”
(Enright 2015) groups. A Fine Gael councillor in South Dublin qualified water meter fairies
as “clearly a subversive organisation seeking to willingly break the law and destroy public
property” (Healy 2015). This representation gained further traction when the Irish
Independent reported in November 2014 that “dissident republicans have infiltrated groups
protesting against water charges” (Brady et al. 2014) Among protesters, such accusations
were denounced as unsubstantiated delegitimisation attempts and water meter fairies
disappeared following the reversal of water charges.xiii Yet, their strong rhetorical reactions
25
show that Irish elites understood the implicit challenges posed to their legitimacy by these
types of grass roots struggles in Ireland.
This section suggests that protesters were able to use semiotic signifiers rooted in Irish history
and culture to work in favour of their political goals. At the same time, these practices made
much of Irish resistance to austerity invisible or unintelligible, seen from European or
international political scales. While the semiotic practices hindered, rather than enabled
transfer of scales, this suited the protesters' political goal of establishing national politics as
the appropriate forum for political contestation over water provisioning.
Conclusion
The article began by asking under what conditions disruptive resistance in the local and the
everyday may impact on national and international decision-makers in the age of austerity.
Exploring partially successful water/austerity protests in Ireland, I developed analytical
categories that can help drive forward theory-building on these questions. Scalar politics
allows political economists to take into consideration that political settings are not cast in
stone, when thinking through the mechanisms by which certain normative agendas come to
dominate certain policy domains. In order to implement water reform, the Irish government
tied this policy goal to European law and its bailout programme. Resisting water reforms
locally was one activity that helped re-confirming national politics as the appropriate scale for
water policy in Ireland, although the EU now contests this. My study further showed that
material factors include all aspects of the natural world, in addition to economic wealth and
benefit. In Irish water struggles, the physical aspects of water reform made disruptive
resistance highly effective. At the same time, it also meant that these tools of contentious
xiii Any evidence that paramilitary organisations may have gained traction in the austerity era provides a
radically different portrayal of the impacts of Irish austerity, and should be taken seriously in future research,
whether in political economy, peace and conflict studies, or elsewhere.26
politics were less successful in other policy domains affected by austerity. They led to the
watering down, rather than the reversal, of Irish austerity.
In addition, my study emphasised culture as another dimension of scalar politics that is
usually undertheorised in political economy. By focusing on culture as semiotic practice, I
identified rhetorical and symbolic practices of meaning-making that created solidarity among
Irish protesters, helped mobilise people despite the fact that they were facing overwhelming
forms of domination, and helped legitimate illegal tactics. Irish elites presented competing
understandings of the same cultural signifiers, showing that contestations over culture as
semiotic practice are part and parcel of the political contestations in which they occur.
Bringing such analyses into political economy allows us to theorise further through which
precise mechanisms the economy is socially embedded, how forms of social embeddedness
are themselves contested by political actors, and how these processes serve to uphold or
challenge political and economic order.
Future research may operationalise these concepts in different geographical contexts, by
conducting comparative research, and by broadening the range of scalar dimensions under
investigation. For scholars of the Irish water protests, in-depth ethnographic research on
motivations and actions across local communities, protesters' transnational links, and the
gender dynamics of Irish water struggles constitute avenues for future research resulting from
my study. Overall, prominent generalisations of austerity finding acceptance in certain
countries need to be treated with caution. Such representations might reflect flaws in state-
centric, acontextual methodologies, rather than political realities on the ground.
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